Ash

Person.

Learning to Learn

I recently the following on Coursera:

The first course listed was created earlier with mostly a general audience in mind with some focus towards high school and university students. The second course was a follow up targeted at an older audience, especially those with careers. However, I found that the first course actually had a lot more useful, practical information compared to the second. If you had to pick one, definitely go with the first. Here are some of the key ideas that I found especially insightful and helpful from these courses.

There’s quite a bit here but you may only be interested in some of the content. Feel free to skip through as you please!

Two modes of thinking
Chunking
Forming Habits
Memory Development
Optimizing Sleep
Exercise Benefits
Miscellaneous
Conclusion

Two modes of thinking

Throughout the course, we are told about the two types of thinking modes that our brain can engage in: the focused mode and the diffused mode. The first is when we actively engage our brain to solve a problem. In this mode, the brain is running along well-used, fixed pathways; grinding through known routes to try and bring previous knowledge to bear the solve the problem at hand. While this seems like the mode that can get the job done, problems arise when we encounter new problems. We can hit a mental dead end, using the wrong set of skills on a problem.

Specifically, there’s a word for the situation that may arise: einstellung. It’s a German word and in this context it essentially means getting stuck in a rut. Your mind is convinced of a particular way to solve a problem and keeps trying to use that approach even though it’s not the best way and blocks you from reaching the correct one.

Enter the diffuse mode. In this state, the mind is wandering around a little more. We aren’t forcing it to use particular connections and pathways. Instead, we give it leeway to explore new connections. Sometimes these connections might be superfluous but often it’s during this mode of thinking that the brain can form new, useful connections, joining ideas in a way that it would not have during the focused mode. You can encourage your brain to do this by first applying your focused mode of thinking to the problem. Then when you step away from it and let your diffuse mode take over (this can happen when you go exercise, shower, or even sleep!) your brain has already been primed and shifted towards a certain problem so it’s easier to stumble onto that ‘aha!’ moment.

While I’ve heard a little about these two forms of thinking in the past, this was the first time I’ve learned about them as explicitly. The workings of the focused mode weren’t a revelation since that’s the mode I actively engage. It was learning about the diffuse mode that I found especially useful. I’ve definitely had many instances throughout my life where I bang my head against the wall with regards to a particular problem only to step away from it and solve it almost instantly upon returning. I always thought of this as my brain just needing a short break to recharge and while that is part of it, I think a bigger role here is the diffuse mode. When I stepped away, I allowed my brain to explore different avenues to solve the problem that my focused mode was too stubborn to do.

Moving forward, I am definitely going to be more active in allowing my brain to engage in the diffuse mode. Here are a few activities that would constitute as stepping back, during which time the brain will engage the diffuse mode:

Exercising
Sleeping
Socializing with some friends and family
Playing a musical instrument
Painting

Chunking

Chunking is grouping together related ideas into a single concept. Say you’re trying to to solve a particular problem or just carry out a task. You can either try to retrieve the relevant step at each stage or retrieve the chunk which has already grouped together all the steps for you. Here’s a contrived example: making coffee. If you don’t have a chunk that handles this, perhaps you would read the bag to determine how much coffee to put in. Then maybe you’ll look up how much water should be added. Then you might look up how long the coffee should sit before drinking it. (When I say look up here, this could also refer to trying to actively recall this from memory). Without chunking, you would actively pursue each step as it comes and devote a lot of mental energy to the process of making coffee. However, when done enough times, your brain would chunk these related steps under the chunk ‘making coffee’ and you would engage in these without a lot of conscious effort.

In the course, the examples given were usually related to solving particular homework problems but I can easily see how this might apply at a job as well. For example, in my particular line of work, there are several steps required to set up and run a machine learning model. The first few times I did it, I would have to look up previous work to remind me what the steps are. As time has passed, chunks have formed and I can run through the steps more smoothly.

Along with taking less effort, one of the benefits that chunking confers is freeing up more slots in working memory. If solving a particular challenge requires x steps, without chunking you might need x slots in your working memory but with chunking, these steps can be grouped together and only occupy a single working memory slot. The other slots are now free to hold other important information that could be conducive to solving the problem at hand.

One issue that I have had with chunking in the past is that I get bogged down with memorizing the individual steps and their order of execution without making useful connections between the steps. I do end up forming a chunk but one that doesn’t generalize very well. As soon as the problem I was trying to solve changed a little, that chunk I formed would be rendered useless. So when trying to form a chunk, pay attention both to the individual pieces of information but also how they link up! Different instances of problems may require a different order to the steps and this is when the links will play a very important role, without which the individual steps won’t be very helpful.

Another problem I’ve run into with chunking is not learning the context:

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Too often, it can be easy to become over-reliant on a particular chunk. Perhaps most problems you’ve encountered in the past can be framed within a context that this chunk proves useful for. Or you simply haven’t seen a wide range of problems. In any situation, choose the right tool for the job. When forming a chunk, consider the following:

Where does this information fit within the bigger picture?
When should I use this chunk?
When should I not?

These aren’t necessarily easy questions to answer and you’ll only be able to answer them after lots of practice in applying that chunk.

One cool thing about chunking is that you can form chunks of chunks, a hierarchy of chunks as it were. Building on my contrived example from earlier, consider the ‘challenge’ of making breakfast. This could be made off the sub-problems of making coffee, making cereal, and making eggs. For each of these, you could form a chunk and then you could group these chunks together under the chunk of ‘making breakfast’. The higher up the hierarchy of chunking you go, the more powerful that chunk becomes but it also requires more effort to form these larger chunks. This effort can be reduced if the smaller chunks are already well formed so focus on those first if you find yourself struggling with the larger chunking process. With that being said, sometimes the larger chunk you are trying to form can be good motivation for forming these smaller chunks so keep that bigger picture in mind.

Once you have a library of chunks, try jumping between them or interweaving them to develop new connections. Aside from potentially forming a larger, more useful chunk, this process can enhance your creativity too.

If chunking sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is but the payout is huge. However, given that it is energy intensive, when you are trying to form a chunk, focus! Don’t waste finite mental resources on distractions when building chunks.

Forming Habits

Habits can be broken down into 4 steps:

The cue: Something happens that requires a response. For example, this could be an alarm that you’ve set to remind you to begin a task. You’ll react to this cue, positively or negatively.
The routine: This follows on from the reaction to the cue. Perhaps you’ve formed a healthy habit and begin your task. Or perhaps you’re not there yet and decide to procrastinate by watching some tele.
The reward: Depending on the action you take, you’ll receive some reward. Say you reacted favourably, you might reward yourself with a snack. If you procrastinated with tele, you brain gives you a hit of dopamine for consuming some new content.
The belief: Your mind forms the belief that when you react in a particular way to the cue, there’ll be a reward. This belief helps form the habit.

That’s the gist of habits and their formation. Given certain cues, if you’ve trained your mind to have certain routine responses to it, by rewarding such responses in the past, you’re more likely to carry out those routines in the future (with less conscious effort, almost like a zombie habit) because of the belief you’ve formed.

When you first try to form a habit, there can be negative feelings. The brain hurts when it’s learning new things so when you sit down for a session to accomplish some task, these negative feelings can present themselves. The important things is how you deal with these feelings. Focus your application of willpower to changing your reactions to the cue. Place your energy on moving past the negative feelings and beginning the positive routine.

Cues are generally influenced by:

Location
Time
How you feel

Perhaps you may recognize other factors that control how you may react to cues. As best as you can, try to set these factors to be favourable. Anything you can do to increase the chances of reacting positively to the cue brings you closer to forming a healthy habit. Once you get to the routine stage, you are closer to the reward stage. The reward stage will then convince your mind that reacting to the cue with this routine was a good idea and you’ll face less resistance the next time the cue presents itself.

One way to overcome this initial resistance to the task at hand is to focus on the process rather than the product. It’s easier to enlist the brain with a process, rather than a product. Instead of sitting down and telling yourself “I’m going to finish this particular feature for the web application”, tell yourself, “I’m going to work on this particular feature for 25 minutes”. An easy way to do this is using pomodoros. Work for 25 minutes, relax for 5. Sometimes perhaps you get into the groove and want to keep going and by all means, go for it.

However, I often find that after a certain period of continuous working, my brain starts to get a little stuck. Generally by this point, I have become focused on the product rather than the process. I’m likely to force myself to keep going despite the lack of progress. Rarely does this accomplish anything except to get me more frustrated and tired. By taking a break, I find that my mind has time to recharge and when I come back to the task at hand, I do better (this is also because my mind has had time to work in the diffuse mode and get out of its rut!). Always remember that the goal of a session is the process.

Once you’ve accomplished that task (working for 25 minutes, not finishing the feature), reward yourself. It’s extremely important to reward your accomplishments, however small. Only when your brain can expect rewards do habits form. I think more than working continuously for too long, this has been my biggest stumbling block when trying to form healthy habits.

I’ve often told myself that accomplishing the task I set out to do should be a reward in its own right but I’m beginning to realize that my brain isn’t quite wired that way. Especially at the start of the habit forming stage, the brain really needs rewards to get on-board and dedicate resources to the task you’re trying to accomplish. If you just keep pressing on, your brain, losing out on rewards for good behaviour, will start to turn on you. What’s the point of going on if there’s no reward?

Aside from believing that the accomplishment of the task should be its own reward, the other reason I’ve avoided more ‘basic’ rewards (e.g. some YouTube time, a snack, etc) is because I’ve had guilt associated with these tasks. I sometimes catch myself thinking that I shouldn’t be relaxing when the feature that I want to finish up isn’t done yet. However, this betrays that ‘product’ thinking has replaced ‘process’ thinking. Remember that you have finished the task of working at the process for some amount of time and that task should be rewarded even if the ‘greater’ task of finishing the feature is still a work in progress.

Memory Development

I’ve heard of memory tricks before and often ignored them as they came across as hacks rather than some ‘deeper’ understanding or change. I’ve also thought that some people have good memories while others don’t. This course helped me overcome my incorrect presumptions in these areas.

The human brain is built for visual and spatial memory. Evolution favoured this development as it would have helped our ancestors hunt and gather better. So when trying to memorize, we should try to frame the concepts within a visual framework. One example of this is a memory palace. Imagine a place you know well (this shouldn’t be too tricky as your brain is wired to retain this sort of spatial information). Within this place, you can then localize concepts you are trying to memorize within it. Placing these concepts within these familiar locations will hasten the process of memorizing these concepts. Another good way to memorize is using flash cards. On top of the visual aspect of flash cards, handwriting helps better encode memories so by creating your own flashcards, you have a doubly powerful tool for memorization.

Both these approaches used to strike me as hacks which I think to a degree they still are. However, the important thing that this course pointed out to me was that these methods do aid in the creation of chunks and can speed up the learning process. Obviously they aren’t meant to be done in isolation (e.g. just memorizing flash cards without understanding what’s on them) but at the same time, if you try to learn without these helper methods (i.e. just trying to get concepts to stick by understanding them and refusing to use memory tricks), the learning process is going to take much longer.

Like all skills and habits, when you first try these, it will not come very easily. But with practice, these skills will come more naturally to you. One of the interviews done on the course was with Nelson Dellis, a 4 time US memory champion. He made it clear that he did not have an innately good memory but worked at improving his memory.

He provided further elaboration on the memory palace technique:

Visualization: Come up with a picture tied to what you are trying to memorize that means something to you personally. The personalization will make it easier to stick.
Localization: Place this picture somewhere familiar (e.g. some location that you are familiar with).

So here there are two levels of visualization: the concept and where it is located. The more you can do to leverage your brain’s in-built ability to memorize visual and spatial data, the easier a time you’ll have trying to memorize concepts.

On the topic of memory, most of us know that there is a long-term memory and a short-term memory. The analogies that this course used when describing these were helpful to me.

Long-term memory is like a storage warehouse. It can hold a lot of information but retrieving any one piece of information requires some effort. However, by practicing retrieval, you can become faster at this process. It’s like learning the layout of the warehouse, how to better navigate it, and how to more efficiently take stuff off the shelves.

Short-term memory on the other hand is like a blackboard. At any given time, it can’t hold much but at a glance, you can see all that’s on there. When you chunk concepts, they take up less space on the blackboard allowing you to write more on. So the better you can chunk, the more you can hold in your short-term memory. Additionally, you should try and clear your short term memory of unnecessary content when possible. For example, when you recall an errand you need to do, write it down and clear your mind of it. You can place this note somewhere you know you’ll come across later and this way you don’t have to focus on it presently. Another approach here, for some smaller tasks, is to just get it out of the way. If there is some small chore that you’re meant to do and you have the opportunity to just get it out of the way early on, do so! Your mind won’t have to expend energy remembering to get to the task or the todo list later.

Optimizing Sleep

Sleep is important.

I’ve come across this in multiple sources but when push comes to shove, sleep is normally the first thing to take a hit. This course has just been the most recent in a long line of sources encouraging me to get enough sleep. However, there were also a few other aspects covered here that I found quite interesting.

For one, they explicitly state that sleeping flushes the brain clean. I can’t recall the technicalities of it but during sleep, the brain gets a chance to refresh itself. However, working on something before sleeping or explicitly setting in your mind that you want to focus on something (just before sleep) will encourage the brain to dream about this. I don’t think anyone can make claims that this will work all the time but I have often found that whatever I’m dwelling on before sleeping often comes back to me while dreaming. By encouraging this, you are encouraging the diffuse mode of your brain to tinker away, forming connections that you might not have been able to during the focused mode.

Another helpful tip from this course was to jot down your unfinished todos before you hit the hay. These tasks likely take up space in your working memory. By writing them down, you free up space in your working memory and allow the brain to better recharge. Aside from todos, also write down problems you’re facing before you hit the hay. This allows your diffuse mind to think about the todos and the problems while you sleep.

Exercise Benefits

The importance of exercise was stated several times during the course. It was spread about through the other material but it did seem important enough to potentially warrant its own video(s). It definitely made a large enough impact that I figured it deserved its own section in this write-up.

The most common mention of exercise during this course was as a useful activity to help engage the diffuse mode. If you exercise after working on a problem or trying to study a particular topic, during your exercise, the brain’s diffuse mode is chipping away at those concepts. Even if it’s not an intensive exercise like running, something as simple as a walk can really help the learning process. Some material was also cited to show that exercise helps the hippocampus grow new nerves. This increases your brain’s capacity allowing it to more effectively learn.

So my take-aways regarding exercise were to do some light activity more regularly, interweaving it between work sessions perhaps (to encourage more diffuse mode thinking) and also more moderate activity (to build a healthier brain).

Miscellaneous

Those main ideas aside, there were a few more tidbits spread throughout the course. I’ve decided to collate those here.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right

This quote from Henry Ford was shared by Benny Lewis, a polyglot who was interviewed on the course. While it’s definitely similar to more cliche lines ‘It’s all in your head’, I liked how this one was phrased and it’s likely to stick with me for awhile.

Even if others have solved a problem, do it yourself to exercise that part of your brain.

I’ve definitely fallen prey to the trap of not working through things myself. I often think that the answer is somewhere on the internet and that I’ll be able to retrieve it if/when I need the answer. While this is somewhat true for certain very esoteric concepts, when it comes to more frequently accessed material, I think it’s definitely worth building those connections in your mind. The process of working through the steps of the problem for yourself will help you better understand the problem and often the steps required to solve that problem can be applied elsewhere.

Mind-mapping

There was also mention of this concept called ‘mind-mapping’. It consists of two very simple steps:

Get a piece of paper.
Turn the paper sideways.
Vomit your ideas onto the paper.

Apparently the first step if very important because it forces your brain to break out of familiarity, thereby granting you more direct access to the diffuse mode of your brain. During the second step, it’s important not to exert too much control over the flow of ideas and where it leads. This seems very similar to ‘brain-storming’ but with just enough differences that I think it’s a great starting point when beginning a project, especially one that might be more creative in nature.

Don’t edit while you write. It’s like trying to clear the table while you’re eating. Use touch typing, ignore your monitor!

This came from a writing coach, Daphne Gray-Grant, during one of the interviews. It was a great video about the writing process and I’ve definitely tried to put this piece of advice into practice. It has helped a lot! When I go back and try to correct or edit my work, it often breaks the flow of the writing and I sometimes lose my train of thought. Sometimes, it’s not even a case of losing the train of thought but I might lose the sentence I was about to try out. Trying to recall it, often failing, is frustrating and time-consuming.

I find that if I just keep writing and perhaps after a particular section, I go back and do some editing, that works best. Sometimes these edits might just be going back and fixing typos. My writing software often highlights these in red and seeing too many of these underlines on the page can be distracting. Whenever I try to correct a typo immediately, the interruption definitely breaks the flow. I find that these bulk corrections also act as a very small reward.

Whenever your editing self tries to take over during the writing process, talk back to it: It’s writing time now!

Too much highlighting: bad. Summaries in the margin: good.

I think this is something that I’ve been getting an intuitive feel for but it was helpful hearing it explicitly stated. Highlighting often gives the illusion of understanding and it can feel better that simply staring at the page and trying to understand the concepts because you’re actually doing something physical albeit easy. However, those words on the page belong to someone else and if you don’t understand them, highlighting is similar to not working through the problem yourself. You can see what someone else has done and tell yourself that you understand the process but until you do it yourself, you don’t.

Enter summaries. By condensing the information before you, you are forcing your brain to chew and digest the information. You’re also making it easier for the brain to remember since the summary probably contains less fluff, boiling the concept down to its bare essence.

I think forming the habit of making summaries will take some time because the habit of highlighting is easier and more in-grained (likely due to its ease of application). However, making summaries is definitely a habit worth practicing and forming, especially because of how transferable it is.

Before restudying, try to recall!

This was a new concept to me. Apparently, after you read about a particular concept, before you dive back in for another read, try to recall the information you’ve just read without looking (presumably this doesn’t just apply to reading). This act of recall, this retrieval process, helps strengthen the memory. This can help with a particular concept even better than the aforementioned concept-mapping. Application wise, I think this can apply even when dealing with an old concept.

For example, when trying to recall a particular function while writing some code, I’ve found in helpful to spend some time trying to recall the structure of the function before going to google it. By jumping straight to the latter, the information doesn’t really stick and in the long run, all those searches add up in terms of time spent but more importantly, in breaking the flow.

There’s an illusion that engineers are loners, engineering is a team sport.

This was an interesting quote by Dr. Norman Fortenberry. As an engineer myself, I think I sometimes work better alone but for the most part, I definitely work better within team. I think that remembering that engineering is a team sport is important, especially when the team is being difficult.

Absorb information using multiple modes: read, write, listen!

Also from Dr. Fortenberry, I found this a helpful tip and thought I’d share it. It can feel that using these multiple modes of learning increases the amount of time learning but I think having the information stick better actually saves time in the long run. It can be a little tedious, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Those who are committed to a balance between work and leisure get more done than those just on the endless treadmill.

This definitely isn’t new advice but nonetheless it was reassuring to hear it in this course. Finding this balance can be difficult but it’s a difficulty definitely worth enduring to enhance both work and leisure. My piece of advice when it comes to trying to find this balance is to go easy on yourself. Sometimes you may play too much and sometimes you might work too hard. When you think you’ve fallen for either trap, acknowledge it, make a plan to avoid it in the future, and move on. Dwelling on the issue is just detrimental.

Also, while it’s important to have those long work sessions and long leisure sessions (e.g. holidays), as you go about your day, take breaks periodically. Keep yourself refreshed.

Eat your frogs first thing in the morning.

Bit of an odd phrase but it simply means: get an unpleasant task out of the way. If you have negative feelings associated with a task, you’re more likely to put it off. However, it’s still occupying some space in your working memory, distracting from other tasks. Even if it’s just a single pomodoro, do that nice and early. The other benefit I’ve found from this is that I am more committed to other tasks during the day. Because I began with a hard task, other tasks seem easier.

Some tips for your brain health.

These come from Nelson Dellis, the memory champion I mentioned earlier:

Keep your brain active.
Be physically active.
Be social.
Watch your diet.

Obviously there’s a lot that can be explored within any of those particular steps but I’ll leave that to you to discover.

Focus intensely on one task at any given time.

I need a variety of tasks and the ability to jump between each to keep me interested and, ironically, focused on each. In any given moment though, focus on one task at a time. We aren’t good at multitasking. When we do so, our performance at each task degrades. So when you do jump into a particular task, for that session (e.g. pomodoro), just focus on that task. Context switching costs energy that you could be pumping into working at the task at hand!

Hard start - jump to easy

When you tackle a challenge, first start with a hard sub-task but jump to an easy problem once you’ve got stuck. This will get your diffuse mode working on the hard problem. I used to think it was easier to just get the easy problems out of the way but by using this method and spending some initial time on the hard task, some of your mind is still chipping away at the hard problem while you tackle the easier ones.

Music

In general, do what’s best for you. If you find that particular styles of music help you learn better, go along with it. There is some research showing that music with lyrics tends to be more distracting. However, I’ve found that when working on droll, repetitive tasks, I prefer music that is more engaging as it better helps me crunch through the work. When I need to instead focus deeply on the task at hand and be more creative, then lighter, more relaxing music helps.

Additionally, while a little bit of music of background noise (such as the chatter at a coffee shop) can be distracting, this distraction can engage the diffuse mode. So if you’re engaging the focused mode and find yourself hitting a dead end, tune in some music and let the diffuse mode have a go.

Conclusion

That just about wraps up this post. I hope it proved useful and provided ways for you to enhance your learning capabilities. Until next time, enjoy learning!

2020 3
2019 3
2018 11

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